946 research outputs found
Fear of fiction: the authorial response to realism in selected works by Swift, Defoe, and Richardson
No full textIf Mrs. Whitehouse produced a pornographic play, it would arouse enormous interest, mainly because of Mrs. Whitehouse’s well known views on pornography. It is an ancient fact of English Literature that two of the best known pioneers of the English realistic novel, Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, were Puritans. And there is an almost equally ancient critical tradition which traces the easy path of Puritan literature, in combination with other cultural forces, towards the production of realistic fiction. The central argument of this thesis is that there was no such easy path. Puritan autobiography was unrealistic in its very nature, while Puritan feeling towards fiction was hostile, with realistic, or verisimilar fiction provoking most hostility because the most deceitful. Thus the writing of a realistic novel was a radical departure for the Puritan, and one that was fraught with tension. It is this tension, or fear of fiction, and its effects on work of the two Puritan novelists, and that odd Anglican Jonathan Swift, that is the subject of this thesis. Swift joins Defoe and Richardson as an author with a special relationship with Defoe, and himself closer to a fearful anti- mimetic "tradition" than the comic tradition in which he is usually placed alongside Fielding and Sterne. Selected works of the three authors reveal their struggle with the intense problems that realism created for them, and their eventual 'solutions'. Hence by the time that Dr. Johnson made his famous critical statement against the fearful potential of realism in his fourth Rambler [31 March 1750), he was actually formalising material that had been well examined in the fiction under discussion, rather than beating an original critical path in response to Fielding's supposedly 'new' verisimilar form
Author correction: obesity and ethnicity alter gene expression in skin
No full textDaniel Butler was omitted from the author list in the original version of this Article. The Author contributions section now reads: “J.M.W. designed, conducted, and contributed to the writing of the manuscript, prepared Fig. 1. S.G. evaluated and did statistical analysis on the skin and fat samples, prepared Figs. 2–9. J.O.A. evaluated and contributed to writing the manuscript. D.B prepared and sequenced DNA libraries for the skin microbiota data, and wrote the applicable parts of the methods section. C.M. analyzed and wrote up the skin microbiota data, prepared Fig. 10. All authors have read the manuscript and approved its contents. D.D. analyzed and wrote up the skin microbiota data. S.Z. ran and analyzed the skin metabolite data. J.S. assisted in design, analysis and wrote up the skin metabolite data. J.K. assisted in analysis write up of skin and fat data. J.L.B. assisted in analysis, interpretation and writing of the manuscript. P.R.H. designed, analyzed, interpreted the data, and was the primary author of the manuscript.” This has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the Article, and in the accompanying Supplementary Information file.</p
Ethnic identity, political identity and ethnic conflict: simulating the effect of congruence between the two identities on ethnic violence and conflict
No full textThis thesis outlines and presents an alternative hypothetical process to the emergence of ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflicts, rather than being dependent upon pre-existing 'ancient hatreds', are instead the result of a congruence between ethnic and political identity which grants individuals the ability to use ethnicity to identify and eliminate political threats. This hypothesis is formed by the examination of three case studies of ethnic conflict: Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Croatia. This hypothesis is then formalised and tested using an agent based simulation in which agent interactions are dependent upon ethnic and political identity and the congruence between the two. As predicted there was a strong positive correlation between how accurately ethnic identity reflected political identity and the level of ethnically motivated violence in the simulation, although the relationship was not linear. Furthermore the effect of a shift in congruence was found to be roughly comparable to the effect of initialising agents with a moderate level of pre-existing ethnic antagonism
Making the American self Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
No full textDaniel Howe considers the ideas Americans once had about a proper construction of the self. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, Horace Mann, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Dorothea Dix, Frederick Douglass, among others, engaged in discussion about the composition of human nature, the motivation of human behavior, and what can be done about the social problems these create. They shared a common model of human psychology, in which powerful but base passions must be mastered by reason in the service of virtue. How to accomplish this was often itself a subject of passionate controversy. The story reveals that Americans both distrusted individual autonomy and were enthusiastic about it; passions, reason, and moral sense collided on how to manage it. Howe is empathetic to all the quests - for elites and artisans, blacks and women - seeing in them a basic pursuit of identity. The author demonstrates that aspirations for "self-control" and "self-discipline," grounded in conservatism and evangelical Christianity, also shaped movements that branched leftward to promote social welfare, feminism, and civil rights. The desire for personal autonomy and self-construction is a historical bedrock of the nation's ethos
Mr five per cent: the many lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the world's richest man
No full textAt his death in 1955 Calouste Gulbenkian was one of the richest men in the world, known as "Mr Five Percent" on account of his personal holding of 5% of Middle East oil production. His fortune and art collection are now held by the Gulbenkian Foundation, one of the world's wealthiest philanthropies. The companies he helped to create - Royal Dutch-Shell and Total - count among today's oil "supermajors," and the international oil agreements he brokered continue to shape the economic and political fortunes of Iraq, Venezuela and other oil-producing countries across the globe. Gulbenkian's media-shy persona and preference for back-room deals lent him an aura of mystery which continues to this day. Though acknowledged as one of the heroes of the international story of oil by historians such as Daniel Yergin (author of "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power"), Gulbenkian's story has yet to be told
Paranoia and irony in the Anglophone dectective narrative and the novels of Umberto Eco
No full textThe thesis provides a reading of Umberto Eco's three novels, The Name of the
Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Island of the Day Before, that, while it
acknowledges the importance of the Italian literary tradition in which they stand, also
seeks to explain why their author appeals so frequently to literary models outside
Italy, and in particular the Anglo-American detective genre.
Chapter One explains Eco's relationship to the development of Italian literature
through his lifetime. It is noted that Eco is beginning, both in his semiotics and his
fiction, from a position where post-structuralism has been extensively explored by
neo-avant-gardew riters. Eco positions himself alongsides uchw riters as Italo Calvino
and Jorge Luis Borges, who wish to explore the ludic possibilities of working within
structures, while all the time acknowledging the epistemological limitations of so
doing. Eco's chosen structure, more often than not, is the highly defined genre of
the detective story.
From here, the following chapters engage in close readings of the three novels,
with particular emphasis on The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum,
demonstrating that they explore problems of interpretation central to the detective
narrative. In doing this, they display an intimate knowledge of generic developments
within the detective tradition, and of the philosophical and aesthetic uses made of the
genre by other writers. The embedding of intertextual references to other detective
narratives within Eco's novels is an important factor, as they come together to form
a narrative of epistemological inquiry that itself follows Eco's philosophical progress
through the years. In short, the novels, inter alia, map a systematic inquiry into the
possibility of systematic inquiry. They reserve the space to engage in such an ironic
and self-referential project precisely through their fictionality
The Russo-Ukrainian Pre-War Crisis: A Comparative Test of Rational Choice, Expected Utility, Poliheuristic, and Prospect Theories to Explain the War\u27s Outbreak
No full textGiven the tremendous suffering created by the Russo-Ukrainian war and its profound international security implications, policymakers and international relations scholars must fully grasp why the three-month pre-war crisis erupted and ultimately ended in conflict instead of de-escalation. Accordingly, this mixed approach study seeks to identify the most likely crisis-related decision-making strategies adopted by President Biden, Zelensky, and Putin. The dissertation tests rational choice, expected utility, poliheuristic, and prospect theory frameworks against the critical decisions made by the three presidents. The dissertation’s findings indicate that a Prospect Theory-based framework provides the most accurate predictions of the four models tested to explain five critical decisions made immediately before and during the crisis. The Prospect Theory model consistently preferred the non-conciliatory alternatives available to each President, thus steering the crisis into war, which all actors would have preferred to avoid. Further, and to an unexpected degree, the study’s incidental finding highlights the salience of politics in decision-making, concluding that a simple lexicographic decision rule grounded in political interests accurately predicts and explains each leader\u27s choices more reliably and parsimoniously than the four tested frameworks and just as elegantly. This decision strategy, conceptualized as the political-lexicographic model (PLM), is offered as an alternative framework that most aptly explains and predicts the three Presidents\u27 crisis decision-making strategies. Additionally, the dissertation’s comparative approach, which evaluates multiple political leaders involved in the crisis and tests competing decision theories through qualitative and quantitative lenses, demonstrates the value of incorporating several theoretical models and overweighting the political dimension when explaining or attempting to forecast a crisis outcome. The conceptual framework offered in this study is practical, intuitive, and easily adaptable by policymakers, analysts, and scholars. The conclusions and recommendations in this dissertation will ideally contribute to more accurate and reliable predictions and accounts of foreign policy decisions, especially those that involve the potential for inter-state conflict
The Russo-Ukrainian Pre-War Crisis: A Comparative Test of Rational Choice, Expected Utility, Poliheuristic, and Prospect Theories to Explain the War\u27s Outbreak
No full textGiven the tremendous suffering created by the Russo-Ukrainian war and its profound international security implications, policymakers and international relations scholars must fully grasp why the three-month pre-war crisis erupted and ultimately ended in conflict instead of de-escalation. Accordingly, this mixed approach study seeks to identify the most likely crisis-related decision-making strategies adopted by President Biden, Zelensky, and Putin. The dissertation tests rational choice, expected utility, poliheuristic, and prospect theory frameworks against the critical decisions made by the three presidents. The dissertation’s findings indicate that a Prospect Theory-based framework provides the most accurate predictions of the four models tested to explain five critical decisions made immediately before and during the crisis. The Prospect Theory model consistently preferred the non-conciliatory alternatives available to each President, thus steering the crisis into war, which all actors would have preferred to avoid. Further, and to an unexpected degree, the study’s incidental finding highlights the salience of politics in decision-making, concluding that a simple lexicographic decision rule grounded in political interests accurately predicts and explains each leader\u27s choices more reliably and parsimoniously than the four tested frameworks and just as elegantly. This decision strategy, conceptualized as the political-lexicographic model (PLM), is offered as an alternative framework that most aptly explains and predicts the three Presidents\u27 crisis decision-making strategies. Additionally, the dissertation’s comparative approach, which evaluates multiple political leaders involved in the crisis and tests competing decision theories through qualitative and quantitative lenses, demonstrates the value of incorporating several theoretical models and overweighting the political dimension when explaining or attempting to forecast a crisis outcome. The conceptual framework offered in this study is practical, intuitive, and easily adaptable by policymakers, analysts, and scholars. The conclusions and recommendations in this dissertation will ideally contribute to more accurate and reliable predictions and accounts of foreign policy decisions, especially those that involve the potential for inter-state conflict
Archaeological reconstruction illustrations: an analysis of the history, development, motivations and current practice of reconstructionil lustration, with recommendations for its future development.
No full textInitially, this study examines how archaeological reconstruction drawing evolved into its present form. Its development within the wider context of social and art history is traced from the 15th to the 201h century, with
particular attention to its various applications, and the motivations for its production. The result is a clearer understanding and definition of the present role and purposes of this branch of illustration. Secondly,the study examines how these purposes are achieved in
contemporary reconstruction artwork. By using an experiment in reconstruction, each component of the process is examined in turn: the design brief,illustrator, illustration and audience. The illustrations produced by the experiment are ranked according to performance, using
the aims of the reconstruction as criteria. Aspects are identified which appear to contribute to good performance,using the information obtained about the illustrations and illustrators. Finally, the results are reviewed as a whole to identify present and possible future trends that may be worth exploring, and to inform a set of proposed guidelines for the commissioning and production of archaeological reconstructions. At present, archaeological reconstruction artwork has received very little academic attention, and there appears to be no formal identification of its aims, agenda or working practice. This study provides the groundwork for rectifying this situation, and supplies new information in several dffferent areas
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